Yesterday, I mentioned “viral” several times, but I then realized not every one may know that word.

Viral marketing is a term for any thing that you put on the web and then allow users to spread it for you. For that to happen though, the content has to be engaging and/or enigmatic. A good example of this would be the now infamous YouTube video known as “The Dramatic Chipmunk“.

While the creature in the video isn’t even a chipmunk (it’s a prairie dog), and it was originally part of a Japanese talk show, someone put the creatures head movement to music, and it took off like a rocket. The copy I linked you to has been viewed nearly 4 million times, and that’s not counting all the other times it has been uploaded. It has also been “remixed” to be James Bond, part of Kill Bill, and more. It has taken on a life of its own.

Knowing what will go viral is next to impossible, but when you hit on it, it ends up embedded in websites, on social bookmarking sites, social network pages and more. Humor seems to work the best, but forcing humor never goes well. The whole point is, if you can find that lucrative viral item to put on the web, and you even get your company name in it somehow, you’re talking millions upon millions of impressions.

Isn’t it worth at least a try?

It seems just about every one has a Flickr account nowadays, but the question is why don’t you?

It’s free, it’s indexed numerous places, and depending on your picture, it has the potential of going viral. If you are going to be putting up a MySpace profile, and you have pictures you want to post anyway, why not put them on Flickr? You need to upload them somewhere anyway, so you can kill two birds with one stone.

What type of pictures should you upload though? Show off your business, let people see events you’ve had, have an internal contest in your company that challenges your employees to do something creative (the best type of content for going viral) and then put the results on the account. The more pictures, the better, because with each picture, your odds of a potential customer/client of coming across it accidentally goes up.

And best of all, it costs you nothing. Have you noticed how much social marketing really costs you nothing but a little time?

I’ve said numerous times now that you should do as much social networking as you can, but even I think there are limits to this. When I stumbled across Mashable’s list of 350+ social networks, I was then sure there are limits.

With the number of networks out there it can be a bit overwhelming to the novice. The best idea is to stick to the big names when you start out with sites such as MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and so on. As time goes on, as you find sites that are more tailored to your area of work or service, then you can drill to the narrower networks that have more focus.

Start wide, then focus, it’s not costing you anything, in theory, so you have the room to experiment.

A little while back I talked about what social bookmarking is and how to write content worthy of social bookmarking.

Another key is you have to make it easily accessible to the readers. And it’s not just on blogs either, you can add social bookmarking links to just about anything. You just have to make sure the buttons are easy to find, don’t make your users work for it. While most people point to Digg as the the king, which it is, it’s lifespan of being helpful is very short lived. The master of longevity is probably StumbleUpon. I have seen posts that seemed dead to me, get Stumbled by someone 2 months later and bring in another 40 - 50 new, unique visitors to one of my sites.

That’s 40 - 50 people who were new, probably never heard of me, and I got that traffic because it was Stumbled. And all because I made it easy to be Stumbled by including a link. You can’t beat “free” marketing like that when it happens organically.

Considering how much we talk about social marketing, I am sure there are a few of you out there that still wonder why you need it. Why would anyone go this route compared to traditional advertising?

One needs to look no further than the the upcoming Presidential election to know why.

John Edwards was the first to go on the MySpace Presidential Dialogue site, and next will be Barack Obama. If social marketing is good enough for men running for President of the United States, don’t you think it’s good enough for you also?

Remember when all the Internet companies went IPO crazy, and the stock market knew no bounds as they lavished affection on said companies? Then the bubble burst, former Wall Street darlings were now paupers, and the stock market spiraled out of control.

Why do I feel like we may be heading that way again?

Yesterday I mentioned that Facebook is now valued at $15 billion. Why it’s value is that high is anyone’s guess, but I think it has gotten to a point where people go “Oh, well they say it’s worth that much so it must be.”

According to Mashable, LinkedIn is pondering an IPO. They’re in a different position though with the fact they actually sell subscriptions for the bigger levels of service and don’t rely solely on advertising.

Still, all this talk of valuations and IPOs tends to make someone who watched the first tech bubble burst be just a tad bit nervous for fear we’re heading that way again. These sites to be mare valuable to your daily life this time around, it would be a shame to lose them.

The world’s biggest software maker, Microsoft, has already been running Facebook’s ads for over a year, but now they’re fully investing in the company.

What’s an even scarier aspect of this story is that at $240 million dollars, the investment is considered less than 2% of the social networks estimated valuation of $15 billion. With that small of a percentage, it is doubtful that Microsoft will have much, if any, influence on how things are run at Facebook.

There are a few things to wonder about though. A) How did Facebook get such an insane evaluation when people just hang out there? B) If they truly are worth so much, why did they need this “paltry” $240 million from the Bill Gates company?

All things to ponder, but I am sure there have been odder match ups in the technology world… somewhere. For now, things will probably remain unchanged, but it never hurts to keep an eye out.

We talked not long ago about making all your social friends in to an advertising force, but, can you build them in to a full-fledged social marketing team?

Record companies have had something known as “street teams” for years. They give them posters to hang, fliers to hand out, stickers to put on polls, the works. They then award prizes to the street team members who meet goals or do the best job. There’s no reason why this same idea can’t be applied to your “friends”.

Give them banners, buttons, video clips via YouTube, anything that they can place in their profiles that will link back to you and spread your brand and name. As for prizes, in a situation such as this, unless you want to go through the trouble of creating a ton of affiliation links, you can just award prizes based on most creative use, best layout, and so on. The point is more to get your name spread far and wide, and that’s exactly what a social marketing team can do for you.

While I’ve been talking endlessly about the wonders of how social networking can work in your favor, remember it can always swing the other direction quickly. MySpace and Facebook, for all their wonders, can spread bad word-of-mouth just as quickly, if not faster, than they spread praise. And with YouTube, they can even make videos to spread their comments about you.

There is nothing you can do to stop YouTube videos from popping up right away, but with comments on most of the social networking sites can be set to needing your approval before they are made public. And, if you forget, you can always delete, but its always wise to use that sparingly so people don’t wonder what you’re hiding.

Being in the social networking game is essential in this day and age is essential, but just remember it’s not always fun and games.

I’ve mentioned using videos via YouTube before, but know how you can use it even more?

Hold a video contest.

That’s right, a contest. Have customers make a “commercial” for your business (with lots of rules, of course), and tell them they can submit the videos via YouTube because it’s free. In actuality you are having them spread the name of your business all over the popular video sharing site. Tell them the name of your business must be in the title of the video so you can find it in case something goes wrong with their submission, and that will increase your indexing on the site. Carry it even further, and tell them they get a second entry in the contest if they post it to their social networking accounts.

With all the advances in technology, there’s nothing that says you must do all the work to get your name out there in front of the masses.

As much as social marketing may be discussed here, it can’t be the only thing that makes up your online marketing plan. You need to view it more as a portion of your overall plan of attack to get yourself noticed out there amongst the millions of other websites.

Is your website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ready? Would a Pay-Per-Click advertising strategy work for you? What about the affiliate marketing we discussed the other day?

If your plan isn’t coherent, if you just jump from one thing to another, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll be too busy trying to keep up with everything, testing again and again to see what works. Why not give our services a try and save yourself the headaches? My thinking always is: Why should everyone reinvent the wheel?

I’ve been concentrating on how MySpace works best for promoting your business, but what about promoting yourself? The head of a company is the face of their company, and having your own online reputation can be as vital as your businesses.

Great for connecting with old colleagues, employers, and friends from all of your schooling, it’s easy to quickly build up your “network” on LinkedIn. And unlike the other social networks, this one focuses more on the business aspects of true “networking”. They also have promised to keep the site free of those annoying things we run in to on the other sites.

My favorite thing has to be the ability to give and receive recommendations. Had a good working experience with someone that can vouch for you? Let them give you a recommendation you can show off to the world. In return, you do the same for them, both of you building a reputation on a network that can lead to more work, or finding new vendors and suppliers.

It never hurts to take a few minutes to try and promote yourself along the way.

With all the talk of Facebook and LinkedIn, and the massive gains they are making, people tend to think MySpace is falling off to the wayside. According to the latest statistics though, it’s still the king.

(from Mash)Nielsen has released its latest numbers for top social networking sites for the month of September. Not surprisingly, MySpace is still on top, with a 24% increase since September, 2006, while Facebook sidled up again in the number 2 spot, still gaining on MySpace with a 133% increase. This rate of increase is higher for both MySpace and Facebook, which were at 23% and 117% for the month of August, 2007.

As I’ve been saying, MySpace, while skewing to a younger demographic, is still the best place to dip your toe in the social networking waters. It is also the most friendly to businesses by making it easier to add friends in your area, post bulletins, and get your message across. Facebook will probably finally catch up to MySpace, but unless major changes are made, it will never be as business promotion friendly.

Do you use social bookmarking sites for publicity? You should. And if you do, Google has a new Shared Stuff feature that lets you do that - as if Google didn’t have its hands in enough pies already!Well, I’m not complaining. Google’s Shared Stuff feature is very worth a mention. And it’s really easy to use. You drag and drop the little Shared Stuff icon into your Bookmarks tab on your menu bar and when you visit a web page that you like you just click the icon and your page is shared. The most popular shared stuff gets adds to the “Most Popular Shared Stuff” home page of Shared Stuff. The only thing I don’t like about it is the name.

While MySpace was the first of the social networks to go big, but it has suffered from a problem of users overloading their profiles with garbage. Glittery text, music, videos, and more have made it more and more difficult to navigate profiles without getting annoyed.

Well, like Facebook going insane with their development platform, and flooding the profiles with too many applications, MySpace has announced they are going down a similar path. This will make the profiles even more crowded, and more than likely more annoying, but it is sadly still an important part of your social marketing.

I am so glad LinkedIn has promised not to let their platform get out of control.